Part 26

"No, no," he interrupted. "It is useless. I cannot. I am so lonely."

"Give up," she repeated inexorably, "thy wife."

"What sayest thou? My wife! But she is not my wife. Thou art my wife."

"Even so. Give me up. Give me _Get_ (divorce)."

His breath failed, his heart thumped at the suggestion.

"Give thee _Get_!" he whispered.

"Yes. Why didst thou not send me a bill of divorcement when I left thy home for this?"

He averted his face. "I thought of it," he stammered. "And then--"

"And then?" He seemed to see a sardonic glitter in the gray eyes.

"I--I was afraid."

"Afraid!" She laughed in grim mirthlessness. "Afraid of a bed-ridden woman!"

"I was afraid it would make thee unhappy." The sardonic gleam melted into softness, then became more terrible than before.

"And so thou hast made me happy instead!"

"Stab me not more than I merit. I did not think people would be cruel enough to tell thee."

"Thine own lips told me."

"Nay--by my soul," he cried, startled.

"Thine eyes told me, then."

"I feared so," he said, turning them away. "When she came into my house, I--I dared not go to see thee--that was why I did not come, though I always meant to, Sarah, my life. I feared to look thee in the eyes. I foresaw they would read the secret in mine--so I was afraid."

"Afraid!" she repeated bitterly. "Afraid I would scratch them out! Nay, they are good eyes. Have they not seen my heart? For twenty years they have been my light.... Those eyes and mine have seen our children die."

Spasmodic sobs came thickly now. Swallowing them down, she said, "And she--did she not ask thee to give me _Get_?"

"Nay, she was willing to go without. She said thou wast as one dead--look not thus at me. It is the will of God. It was for thy sake, too, Sarah, that she did not become my wife by law. She, too, would have spared thee the knowledge of her."

"Yes; ye have both tender hearts! She is a mother in Israel, and thou art a spark of our father Abraham."

"Thou dost not believe what I say?"

"I can disbelieve it, and still remain a Jewess."

Then, satire boiling over into passion, she cried vehemently, "We are threshing empty ears. Thinkest thou I am not aware of the Judgments--I, the granddaughter of Reb Shloumi (the memory of the righteous for a blessing)? Thinkest thou I am ignorant thou couldst not obtain a _Get_ against me--me who have borne thee children, who have wrought no evil? I speak not of the _Beth-Din_, for in this impious country they are loath to follow the Judgments, and from the English _Beth-Din_ thou wouldst find it impossible to obtain the _Get_ in any case, even though thou didst not marry me in this country, nor according to its laws. I speak of our own _Rabbonim_--thou knowest even the Maggid would not give thee _Get_ merely because thy wife is bed-ridden. That--that is what thou wast afraid of."

"But if thou art willing,--" he replied eagerly, ignoring her scornful scepticism.

His readiness to accept the sacrifice was salt upon her wounds.

"Thou deservest I should let thee burn in the lowest Gehenna," she cried.

"The Almighty is more merciful than thou," he answered. "It is He that hath ordained it is not good for man to live alone. And yet men shun me--people talk--and she--she may leave me to my loneliness again." His voice faltered with self-pity. "Here thou hast friends, nurses, visitors. I--I have nothing. True, thou didst bear me children, but they withered as by the evil eye. My only son is across the ocean; he hath no love for me or thee."

The recital of their common griefs softened her toward him.

"Go!" she whispered. "Go and send me the _Get_. Go to the Maggid, he knew my grandfather. He is the man to arrange it for thee with his friends. Tell him it is my wish."

"God shall reward thee. How can I thank thee for giving thy consent?"

"What else have I to give thee, my Herzel, I who eat the bread of strangers? Truly says the Proverb, 'When one begs of a beggar the Herr God laughs!'"

"I will send thee the _Get_ as soon as possible."

"Thou art right, I am a thorn in thine eye. Pluck me out quickly."

"Thou wilt not refuse the _Get_, when it comes?" he replied apprehensively.

"Is it not a wife's duty to submit?" she asked with grim irony. "Nay, have no fear. Thou shalt have no difficulty in serving the _Get_ upon me. I will not throw it in the messenger's face.... And thou wilt marry her?"

"Assuredly. People will no longer talk. And she must needs bide with me. It is my one desire."

"It is mine likewise. Thou must atone and save thy soul."

He lingered uncertainly.

"And thy dowry?" he said at last. "Thou wilt not make claim for compensation?"

"Be easy--I scarce know where my _Cesubah_ (marriage certificate) is. What need have I of money? As thou sayest, I have all I want. I do not even desire to purchase a grave--lying already so long in a charity-grave. The bitterness is over."

He shivered. "Thou art very good to me," he said. "Good-bye."

He stooped down--she drew the bedclothes frenziedly over her face.

"Kiss me not!"

"Good-bye, then," he stammered. "God be good to thee!" He moved away.

"Herzel!" She had uncovered her face with a despairing cry. He slouched back toward her, perturbed, dreading she would retract.

"Do not send it--bring it thyself. Let me take it from thy hand."

A lump rose in his throat. "I will bring it," he said brokenly.

The long days of pain grew longer--the summer was coming, harbingered by sunny days that flooded the wards with golden mockery. The evening Herzel brought the _Get_, Sarah could have read every word on the parchment plainly, if her eyes had not been blinded by tears.

She put out her hand toward her husband, groping for the document he bore. He placed it in her burning palm. The fingers closed automatically upon it, then relaxed, and the paper fluttered to the floor. But Sarah was no longer a wife.

Herzel was glad to hide his burning face by stooping for the fallen bill of divorcement. He was long picking it up. When his eyes met hers again, she had propped herself up in her bed. Two big round tears trickled down her cheeks, but she received the parchment calmly and thrust it into her bosom.

"Let it lie there," she said stonily, "there where thy head hath lain. Blessed be the true Judge."

"Thou art not angry with me, Sarah?"

"Why should I be angry? She was right--I am but a dead woman. Only no one may say _Kaddish_ for me, no one may pray for the repose of my soul. I am not angry, Herzel. A wife should light the Sabbath candles, and throw in the fire the morsel of dough. But thy home was desolate, there was none to do these things. Here I have all I need. Now thou wilt be happy, too."

"Thou hast been a good wife, Sarah," he murmured, touched.

"Recall not the past; we are strangers now," she said, with recurrent harshness.

"But I may come and see thee--sometimes." He had stirrings of remorse as the moment of final parting came.

"Wouldst thou reopen my wounds?"

"Farewell, then."

He put out his hand timidly; she seized it and held it passionately.

"Yes, yes, Herzel! Do not leave me! Come and see me here--as a friend, an acquaintance, a man I used to know. The others are thoughtless--they forget me--I shall lie here--perhaps the Angel of Death will forget me, too." Her grasp tightened till it hurt him acutely.

"Yes, I will come--I will come often," he said, with a sob of physical pain.

Her clasp loosened, she dropped his hand.

"But not till thou art married," she said.

"Be it so."

"Of course thou must have a 'still wedding.' The English synagogue will not marry thee."

"The Maggid will marry me."

"Thou wilt show me her _Cesubah_ when thou comest next?"

"Yes--I will contrive to get it from her."

A week passed--he brought the marriage certificate.

Outwardly she was calm. She glanced through it. "God be thanked," she said, and handed it back. They chatted of indifferent things, of the doings of the neighbours. When he was going, she said, "Thou wilt come again?"

"Yes, I will come again."

"Thou art so good to spend thy time on me thus. But thy wife--will she not be jealous?"

He stared, bewildered by her strange, eerie moments.

"Jealous of thee?" he murmured.

She took it in its contemptuous sense and her white lips twitched. But she only said, "Is she aware thou hast come here?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Do I know? I have not told her."

"Tell her."

"As thou wishest."

There was a pause. Presently the woman spoke.

"Wilt thou not bring her to see me? Then she will know that thou hast no love left for me--"

He flinched as at a stab. After a painful moment he said: "Art thou in earnest?"

"I am no marriage-jester. Bring her to me--will she not come to see an invalid? It is a _mitzvah_ (good deed) to visit the sick. It will wipe out her trespass."

"She shall come."

She came. Sarah stared at her for an instant with poignant curiosity, then her eyelids drooped to shut out the dazzle of her youth and freshness. Herzel's wife moved awkwardly and sheepishly. But she was beautiful--a buxom, comely country girl from a Russian village, with a swelling bust and a cheek rosy with health and confusion.

Sarah's breast was racked by a thousand needles. But she found breath at last.

"God bless--thee, Mrs.--Kretznow," she said gaspingly.

She took the girl's hand.

"How good thou art to come and see a sick creature."

"My husband willed it," the new wife said in deprecation. She had a simple, stupid air that did not seem wholly due to the constraint of the strange situation.

"Thou wast right to obey. Be good to him, my child. For three years he waited on me, when I lay helpless. He has suffered much. Be good to him!"

With an impulsive movement she drew the girl's head down to her and kissed her on the lips. Then with an anguished cry of "Leave me for to-day," she jerked the blanket over her face and burst into tears. She heard the couple move hesitatingly away. The girl's beauty shone on her through the opaque coverings.

"O God!" she wailed. "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, let me die now. For the merits of the Patriarchs take me soon, take me soon."

Her vain passionate prayer, muffled by the bedclothes, was wholly drowned by ear-piercing shrieks from the ward above--screams of agony mingled with half-articulate accusations of attempted poisoning--the familiar paroxysm of the palsied woman who clung to life.

The thrill passed again through Sister Margaret. She uplifted her sweet humid eyes.

"Ah, Christ!" she whispered. "If I could die for her!"

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XI

THE SABBATH-BREAKER

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XI

THE SABBATH-BREAKER

The moment came near for the Polish centenarian grandmother to die. From the doctor's statement it appeared she had only a bad quarter of an hour to live. Her attack had been sudden, and the grandchildren she loved to scold could not be present.

She had already battled through the great wave of pain, and was drifting beyond the boundaries of her earthly Refuge. The nurses, forgetting the trouble her querulousness and her overweening dietary scruples had cost them, hung over the bed on which the shrivelled entity lay. They did not know she was living again through the one great episode of her life.

Nearly forty years back, when (though already hard upon seventy and a widow) a Polish village was all her horizon, she received a letter. It arrived on the eve of Sabbath on a day of rainy summer. It was from her little boy--her only boy--who kept a country inn seven-and-thirty miles away, and had a family. She opened the letter with feverish anxiety. Her son--her _Kaddish_--was the apple of her eye. The old woman eagerly perused the Hebrew script, from right to left. Then weakness overcame her and she nearly fell.

Embedded casually enough in the four pages was a passage that stood out for her in letters of blood. "I am not feeling very well lately; the weather is so oppressive and the nights are misty. But it is nothing serious; my digestion is a little out of order, that's all." There were roubles for her in the letter, but she let them fall to the floor unheeded. Panic fear, travelling quicker than the tardy post of those days, had brought rumour of a sudden outbreak of cholera in her son's district. Already alarm for her boy had surged about her heart all day; the letter confirmed her worst apprehensions. Even if the first touch of the cholera-fiend was not actually on him when he wrote, still he was by his own confession in that condition in which the disease takes easiest grip. By this time he was on a bed of sickness--nay, perhaps on his death-bed, if not dead. Even in those days the little grandmother had lived beyond the common span; she had seen many people die, and knew that the Angel of Death does not always go about his work leisurely. In an epidemic his hands are too full to enable him to devote much attention to each case. Maternal instinct tugged at her heart-strings, drawing her toward her boy. The end of the letter seemed impregnated with special omen--"Come and see me soon, dear little mother. I shall be unable to get to see you for some time." Yes, she must go at once--who knew but that it would be the last time she would look upon his face?

But then came a terrible thought to give her pause. The Sabbath was just "in"--a moment ago. Driving, riding, or any manner of journeying was prohibited during the next twenty-four hours. Frantically she reviewed the situation. Religion permitted the violation of the Sabbath on one condition--if life was to be saved. By no stretch of logic could she delude herself into the belief her son's recovery hinged upon her presence--nay, analyzing the case with the cruel remorselessness of a scrupulous conscience, she saw his very illness was only a plausible hypothesis. No; to go to him now were beyond question to profane the Sabbath.

And yet beneath all the reasoning, her conviction that he was sick unto death, her resolve to set out at once, never wavered. After an agonizing struggle she compromised. She could not go by cart--that would be to make others work into the bargain, and would moreover involve a financial transaction. She must walk! Sinful as it was to transgress the limit of two thousand yards beyond her village--the distance fixed by Rabbinical law--there was no help for it. And of all the forms of travelling, walking was surely the least sinful. The Holy One, blessed be He, would know she did not mean to work; perhaps in His mercy He would make allowance for an old woman who had never profaned His rest-day before.

And so, that very evening, having made a hasty meal, and lodged the precious letter in her bosom, the little grandmother girded up her loins to walk the seven-and-thirty miles. No staff took she with her, for to carry such came under the Talmudical definition of work. Neither could she carry an umbrella, though it was a season of rain. Mile after mile she strode briskly on, toward that pallid face that lay so far beyond the horizon, and yet ever shone before her eyes like a guiding star. "I am coming, my lamb," she muttered. "The little mother is on the way."

It was a muggy night. The sky, flushed with a weird, hectic glamour, seemed to hang over the earth like a pall. The trees that lined the roadway were shrouded in a draggling vapour. At midnight the mist blotted out the stars. But the little grandmother knew the road ran straight. All night she walked through the forest, fearless as Una, meeting neither man nor beast, though the wolf and the bear haunted its recesses, and snakes lurked in the bushes. But only the innocent squirrels darted across her path. The morning found her spent, and almost lame. But she walked on. Almost half the journey was yet to do.

She had nothing to eat with her; food, too, was an illegal burden, nor could she buy any on the holy day. She said her Sabbath morning prayer walking, hoping God would forgive the disrespect. The recital gave her partial oblivion of her pains. As she passed through a village the dreadful rumour of cholera was confirmed; it gave wings to her feet for ten minutes, then bodily weakness was stronger than everything else, and she had to lean against the hedges on the outskirts of the village. It was nearly noon. A passing beggar gave her a piece of bread. Fortunately it was unbuttered, so she could eat it with only minor qualms lest it had touched any unclean thing. She resumed her journey, but the rest had only made her feet move more painfully and reluctantly. She would have liked to bathe them in a brook, but that, too, was forbidden. She took the letter from her bosom and reperused it, and whipped up her flagging strength with a cry of "Courage, my lamb! the little mother is on the way." Then the leaden clouds melted into sharp lines of rain, which beat into her face, refreshing her for the first few moments, but soon wetting her to the skin, making her sopped garments a heavier burden, and reducing the pathway to mud, that clogged still further her feeble footsteps. In the teeth of the wind and the driving shower she limped on. A fresh anxiety consumed her now--would she have strength to hold out? Every moment her pace lessened, she was moving like a snail. And the slower she went the more vivid grew her prescience of what awaited her at the journey's end. Would she even hear his dying word? Perhaps--terrible thought!--she would only be in time to look upon his dead face! Mayhap that was how God would punish her for her desecration of the holy day. "Take heart, my lamb!" she wailed. "Do not die yet. The little mother comes."

The rain stopped. The sun came out, hot and fierce, and dried her hands and face, then made them stream again with perspiration. Every inch won was torture now, but the brave feet toiled on. Bruised and swollen and crippled, they toiled on. There was a dying voice--very far off yet, alas!--that called to her, and as she dragged herself along, she replied: "I am coming, my lamb. Take heart! the little mother is on the way. Courage! I shall look upon thy face, I shall find thee alive."

Once a wagoner observed her plight and offered her a lift, but she shook her head steadfastly. The endless afternoon wore on--she crawled along the forest-way, stumbling every now and then from sheer faintness, and tearing her hands and face in the brambles of the roadside. At last the cruel sun waned, and reeking mists rose from the forest pools. And still the long miles stretched away, and still she plodded on, torpid from over-exhaustion, scarcely conscious, and taking each step only because she had taken the preceding. From time to time her lips mumbled: "Take heart, my lamb! I am coming." The Sabbath was "out" ere, broken and bleeding, and all but swooning, the little grandmother crawled up to her son's inn, on the border of the forest. Her heart was cold with fatal foreboding. There was none of the usual Saturday night litter of Polish peasantry about the door. The sound of many voices weirdly intoning a Hebrew hymn floated out into the night. A man in a caftan opened the door, and mechanically raised his forefinger to bid her enter without noise. The little grandmother saw into the room behind. Her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren were seated on the floor--the seat of mourners.

"Blessed be the true Judge!" she said, and rent the skirt of her dress. "When did he die?"

"Yesterday. We had to bury him hastily ere the Sabbath came in."

The little, grandmother lifted up her quavering voice, and joined the hymn, "I will sing a new song unto Thee, O God; upon a harp of ten strings will I sing praises unto Thee."

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The nurses could not understand what sudden inflow of strength and impulse raised the mummified figure into a sitting posture. The little grandmother thrust a shrivelled claw into her peaked, shrunken bosom, and drew out a paper, crumpled and yellow as herself, covered with strange crabbed hieroglyphics, whose hue had long since faded. She held it close to her bleared eyes--a beautiful light came into them, and illumined the million-puckered face. The lips moved faintly; "I am coming, my lamb," she mumbled. "Courage! The little mother is on the way. I shall look on thy face. I shall find thee alive."

Printed in the United States of America.

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